‘There’s so much I’d like to see.’
‘Whatever you want to see, there’s probably a correspondent’s report listed for it,’ Marje said.
‘Not the same as first-hand experience, though, is it?’
‘Not in the least,’ Marje agreed. From the slight nod of Hoon’s head she wondered if she had just passed some kind of test in the woman’s mind. ‘But perhaps I’m just boring and have no spirit of adventure. My field is psychology and we have all the information we’re likely to need on that here in the present.’
‘That’s not just your preparation talking, then,’ Hoon said. Part of the social preparation that every child had was to make people comfortable with living in the modern world, and that meant disinclining them to live anywhere else. The higher up the ladder one rose, the less preparation was required and the more one’s thoughts could roam.
‘No. I’d know if it was.’ Hoon raised a sceptic eyebrow. ‘I would,’ Marje insisted. ‘You have to know your own mind if you’re going to study other people’s.’
‘Good point.’
‘So what in our history would you like to see?’ Marje said.
Hoon looked thoughtful. ‘Where to start?’ she said. ‘Let’s see. I’d like to visit the Neanderthals and learn about their civilization. I’d like to watch the first humans arrive in North America. I’d like to talk to Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and clear up a couple of points. I’d like to witness the building of Stonehenge and the Nazca Lines, find out what they’re for—’
‘We know all that. I’ve seen the correspondents’ reports.’
‘I know, I know.’ Hoon gave a wry smile. ‘And you don’t want the past overrun with romantics like me. But that’s what I’d like. And maybe—’
‘Maybe?’
‘No.’ Hoon shook her head. ‘You wouldn’t approve.’
‘No, go on,’ Marje said, intrigued. ‘Please.’
‘Marje, there is such potential in the Home Time and we don’t use it. Instead we let the space nations crowd us in on Earth when there’s room for us all out there. Why not send ships back hundreds, thousands of years? Colonize space before the space nations get there?’
Marje knew how rude it would be to express her immediate reaction and so she kept quiet, and Hoon carried on regardless. ‘And maybe… correct a few things. This and that. It wouldn’t affect us here, would it? This is the Home Time. All the streams lead here. But if you could prevent all the wars, all the plagues, all the famines of history, think how many lives you would be saving.’
Marje sighed. This woman was on the Oversight Committee: she was one of the people responsible for keeping College and World Executive in touch. ‘And all the people who lived instead never would,’ she said. ‘We don’t play God, Ekat. Have you heard of Jean Morbern?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘He left us with a set of ethics—’ said Marje.
‘And an artificial intelligence that makes damn sure you keep to them. AIs can be overridden, Marje. Do you want a fancified computer telling you what to do?’
‘If I disagreed with it, no, I wouldn’t. But the Register isn’t a fancified computer and I agree with every detail of Morbern’s Code.’ Marje heard her voice growing cold but made no effort to change it. ‘It’s not just that all College personnel are sworn to follow it. You have to realize, Jean Morbern was horrified when he realized what… what godlike things he had done. Creating the timestreams meant creating millions, billions more people, all individuals, all with rights. He didn’t mean to create the streams — they just… happened when he made his first visits upstream, before he’d got the hang of probability shielding. He felt he had no right to create them and therefore no right to uncreate either.’
‘And you’re with him, Marje?’ Hoon said quietly.
‘I’m afraid I am,’ Marje said. ‘I’m surprised Hossein didn’t tell you all this before,’ she added.
Hoon paused, then smiled and bowed. ‘I was out of order and I apologize. Can we start again?’
If Hoon was offering an olive branch, that was fine by Marje. ‘Let’s do that,’ she said with a smile.
‘Ah, here comes Hossein…’
Marje turned to look, and winced at a sudden crash. All heads turned in that direction. Asaldra had been worming his way towards them with a tray in one hand. Someone had stepped backwards at the wrong moment and the tray had gone flying. The man who had bumped into the tray staggered, arms flailing about. His foot came down on one of the fallen glasses and it broke into several fragments.
‘Don’t touch it!’ the man shouted, panicked. He stared down at the fragments and from the way his eyes were fixed on the broken glass, Marje knew that his symb was pumping in screaming, lurid images of blood in front of his eyes whenever he thought of picking it up. Antipathy to sharp edges was something that everyone had in their preparation, but lower classifications like this man had it more than most. ‘I–I’ll call a drone…’ he said.
‘Oh, please,’ said Asaldra. He knelt down and carefully picked up the fragments, placing them in his cupped left hand. The man recoiled as he straightened up. Asaldra looked over at the two women, shrugged and pulled a face, and turned to go back to the bar with his unwelcome cargo. The crowd parted in front of him.
Conversation gradually picked up once more, now that the crisis was over and the unpleasant reality of sharp edges that could hurt someone had been removed.
‘Social preparation,’ said Hoon dryly. ‘Where would we be without it?’
Marje took a breath. ‘It enables twenty billion human beings to live together without harming each other, and to me that justifies a lot.’ She wondered who had had the bright idea of using real glass in the glasses. It was taking the love of anachronism too far.
‘Even to the point of not being able to stand the thought of broken glass? Come on, Marje! Our race evolved using sharp edges. Why do we force-feed our children from birth onwards with the idea that that sharp edges are bad?’
‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is that any other society in history would have called social preparation brainwashing, a tool to keep the people down. Can you imagine the Directorate with social preparation?’
This was going too far. Comparing the Home Time to the twenty-second century’s most unpleasant regime was too much.
‘But we’re not the Directorate,’ Marje said with a brittle smile.
‘No, but we might very well become that, when the Home Time ends in twenty-seven years time and the World Executive realizes it has twenty billion people to keep happy and nothing to do it with. Oh, we’ll keep cruising on momentum for a century or so, living off the memories which the College gave us…’
‘Social Studies is working on that,’ Marje said. ‘The end of the Home Time won’t take anyone by surprise, Ekat.’
‘It certainly won’t,’ Hoon agreed. ‘You can depend on that.’
‘Rico?’ Su paused on the edge of the ravine, judged that Rico wasn’t down there, and looked around. ‘Where are you?’
‘Over here,’ Rico said faintly. He had dragged himself to a tree and was sitting on the ground with his back to it. He had tried to use the symb channel to get help but it had shut down. Presumably it had been open just long enough to entice him.
Su gasped. The massive bruise on one side of his face was clear in the moonlight.
‘What happened to you?’
‘Walked into a door.’ He held up a hand. ‘Help me up, Su.’
‘There aren’t any doors here.’
‘I didn’t think so either, but it’s –’ Rico hissed in pain as he slowly rose to the vertical, Su taking his weight on one side and the crutch on the other — ‘amazing what you find if you look hard enough.’
‘Rico, you went off for drinks, and that was the last we saw of you, and now…’
‘I’ll be OK after half an hour in a healer,’ Rico said. ‘Just help me get to the recall area.’ Slowly, they began to hobble off, and Rico shut his ears to Su’s protests while his mind worked over what he had been through.
Yes, it made sense. Low classification: might be able to do it, but social preparation would prevent it. High classification: less social preparation, but no idea how to do it.
But high classification, and control over a group of very strong ‘tals with no social preparation at all: all of a
